When Boeselager was a 25-year-old field lieutenant, he was part of Operation Valkyrie, a plan developed to take control of Germany once Hitler had been assassinated. Boeselager’s role in the plan was to order his troops, who were unaware of the plot, to leave the front lines in Eastern Europe and to head west, where they would be airlifted to Berlin to seize crucial parts of the city in a full-scale coup d’état after Hitler had been killed.
Boeselager’s opinion turned against the Nazi government in June 1942, after he received news that five Roma people had been shot in cold blood solely because of their ethnicity. Together with his commanding officer, Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, he joined a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. The first attempt was in March 1943, when both Hitler and Heinrich Himmler were coming to the front to participate in a strategy meeting with Kluge’s troops.
Boeselager was given a Walther PP with which he was to shoot both Hitler and Himmler at a dinner table in the officers’ mess. However, nothing ever came of this plan because at the last minute, Himmler left Hitler’s company, and the risk of leaving him alive to succeed Hitler was too great.
The second assassination attempt was in summer 1944. No longer caring about Himmler, the conspiracy planned to kill Hitler with a bomb when he was attending another strategy meeting in a wooden barracks. When the assassin’s bomb failed to kill the Führer, Boeselager was informed in time to turn his unexplained cavalry retreat around and return to the front before suspicions could be aroused. Because of Boeselager’s fortunate timing, his involvement in the operation went undetected, and he was not executed, unlike the majority of the conspirators. Philipp’s brother Georg was also a participant in the plot, and likewise remained undetected, but was later killed in action on the Eastern Front.
Shortly before the end of the war, Boeselager overheard General Wilhelm Burgdorf saying, “When the war is over, we will have to purge, after the Jews, the Catholic officers in the army”.[5] The devoutly-Catholic Boeselager noisily objected, citing his own decorations for heroism in combat. Boeselager then left before Burgdorf could respond.
